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That is the last thing I want to hear. All full of Life forms that are use to gravity much greater then what we are use full. If they beat us to space they will land on earth being smarter and stronger then us. I like the Old Grays small stature and wimpy. Sure they may have massive mental powers but I can really whack them hard with a big stick.

I'm guessing that you're either being silly or haven't taken your medication, but since there are no stupid questions and lots of other people are probably wondering about this, the second link points out that the increase in gravity isn't all that much: "For example, a planet with 5 times Earth’s mass but twice the radius would have a surface gravity only 20% higher than Earth; if you weighed 150 pounds here you’d weigh 180 pounds there."

You are missing the main rule of Science Fiction. Humans are always the best balanced species.If Aliens are strong then us then we are smarter then them. If Aliens are smarter then us then we are stronger then they are. If they are both stronger and smarter then us then humans are more creative or adaptable.

That is why I kinda like the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent is so unremarkable that he is spending most of the time trying to stay out of everybody ways. And the rest of the human popul

You are missing the main rule of Science Fiction. Humans are always the best balanced species.
If Aliens are strong then us then we are smarter then them. If Aliens are smarter then us then we are stronger then they are. If they are both stronger and smarter then us then humans are more creative or adaptable.

That is why I kinda like the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent is so unremarkable that he is spending most of the time trying to stay out of everybody ways. And the rest of the human popu

Actually, the one thing humans seem to have a knack for in the Uplift series is Uplifting things. Without being told we should be doing it we Uplifted two species to an almost independent level and got a third well on its way, all without having the Library to draw on.

I see, we could distract them to the point of stupefaction with our porn, eh?

There's one little fly in that particular ointment: we don't know how they reproduce. Also, they are most likely physically completely different to us and unlikely to find our unusual-to-them (i.e. ugly) forms appealing. That is, if they are visually stimulated.

What if their species, for example, reproduces by some sort of body clock causing an alteration in behaviour that results in a transfer of genetic material? It could be a co

There is plenty of Science fiction refuting your statement about humans always being portrayed as the best balanced species. Chances are any exterrestrial capable of reaching earth would most likely ignore us as primitive savages and continue thier explorations else where in their search for intelligent life.

So we are just the lousy MOR race like in most RPGs? Not the fastest, smartest, strongest, just plain vanilla average across the board. We're like the unseasoned mashed potatoes of races! We're Oatmeal with no cinnamon!

As for TFA, we care about this.....why exactly? Personally I find it depressing as hell, its like "Hey look, here is another bunch of planets we will never see in person nor step foot on isn't that great?". What is the point when our engine tech frankly isn't any better than what they had

Honestly, the GGP mangled his post and was talking about the act of shopping having different weights. I was poking fun at the inexplicable grammatical failure in a quasi-edgy way. I guess that was a bit of a whoosh moment.

You are right the the increase of surface gravity is only 25% for a planet 5 times Earth's weight and twice it's radius, but it is not a place to support life....
The Earth's mean density=5.15 g/cm^3
Iron has a density =7.87 g/cm^3
The Earth's inner core of 1200 km is mostly iron with a density near 12 g/cm^3, so that tells you the type of pressure the iron is under. density of Earth's layers [wikipedia.org]
Most rocks have a density < 3 g/cm^3
so I think "your" planet, which has a density of 3.219g/cm^3, has most

If they are super Aliens then we are probably meaty animals with soft bones that they can easily chew up.

Any species capable of interstellar travel must, by definition, be a social species. It's not the type you technology you can achieve without cooperation. I personally believe that the concept of an alien species who would have no qualms about destroying another sentient species is science fiction, and nothing more.

Anyone capable of coming here would be much more interested in our cultures than in our meat. Earth has plenty of other animals we'd be happy to share with them at a table while talking about

I think this whole "we're lawless sociopaths at heart" line can be overplayed. Yes, there are riots and there are looting, but if humans were truly as sociopathic as some make out, law and order would be impossible. What I think most riots, for instance, demonstrate is not how lone wolf we can be, but quite the opposite, how immediate peer pressure can make even sensible people behave badly. In short, people tend follow the strongest personalities, and as often as strong personalities may be leading peop

Think about it, do you think chimps when they make war on an enemy tribe (the only other critter besides us on the planet who does such a thing), that they're exhibiting sociopathic tendencies, or in fact, exhibiting just how powerful social tribalism can be?

In all probability, any species sufficiently advanced to have FTL would use it to export its riff-raff to galaxies far, far away. Remember, our first contact will not be with the ones who dreamed, designed, and engineered the FTL ships. It will be with the Cortezes and Pizzaroes who seek their fortunes far from the established trade routes, beyond the reach of their species laws and ethics.

Don't be ridiculous. What could we humans possibly have that any alien Cortezes would have any interest in, that they couldn't get much more easily at a much closer destination?

The European explorers and conquerers came here for resources and land. Cortez and those other asshole Spaniards mainly wanted gold. Aliens don't need gold; I'm sure they can find all the gold they want (or any other mineral resource) in a convenient asteroid, instead of having to travel all the way over here. Later explorers wan

So why didn't the same apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Europeans who came to the New World?

Simple: because the European explorers were coming here for resources and later land. The natives were in the way of their goals.

This doesn't apply to aliens. Aliens don't need our resources; there's nothing special on earth that they can't mine in their own star system, or on some uninhabited asteroid or moon somewhere. They don't need to come all the way over here for anything. And aliens probably don't want our

The one sapient species we know of today doesn't have technology remotely sufficient to achieve interstellar travel, and it doesn't look like it will develop such technology for probably another 1000 years or more. In fact it's questionable that humans will ever develop such technology before destroying themselves or suffering a collapse of civilization due to resource mismanagement.

Any species advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel is probably going to be far more ethically advanced than we are.

Compete for what? The galaxy is full of dead moons and planets and asteroids with all the resources you could want, and it's full of stars with all the energy you could want. What is there to compete for?

This argument seems to assume that there's some kind of lack of resources. From our perspective, there is, because we're limited to the resources available on this planet, and by our own lack of technology. Things are going to be very different as soon as (or if) we develop the technology to explore our

Maybe they'd conquer Earth to turn it into some sort of weird alien spa. "Take a relaxing trip to Terra 3! Bask in the warming rays of Terra's star. The lighter gravity will make you feel years younger. All of your needs will be catered to by Terran slaves. We don't even mind if you break a few. We've got billions more."

We can only hope that their bodies had to spend more energy on supportive body mass and fibers than brain power. But if they are landing here then they made at least some of the qualifying grade for brains which is indeed scary. But think of the inverse!I just can't imagine being the person to investigate the surface of a super earth if we could land on them (hypothetical of course). I just can't help but think there would be a risk of breaking a leg just by falling while walking or jumping. Never mind the

Even if the surface gravity would be twice Earth's, I'm sure it'd be manageable. In a few weeks you'd get used to it. Of course you'd have joint problems not unlike those fat people have, but hey, all in the name of science:)

We can only hope that their bodies had to spend more energy on supportive body mass and fibers than brain power. But if they are landing here then they made at least some of the qualifying grade for brains which is indeed scary. But think of the inverse!
I just can't imagine being the person to investigate the surface of a super earth if we could land on them (hypothetical of course). I just can't help but think there would be a risk of breaking a leg just by falling while walking or jumping. Never mind the blackout risk trying to do anything useful like climb a hill on a body with 4-5 times earth gravity. Humans do OK for a while with less gravity before our bodies have problems, but we are really pretty bad in an environment with more of it.

If we could manage to travel to a Super Earth in any sort of reasonable time frame, I would think dealing with the gravity upon arrival would be a trivial problem. We would likely have invented "artificial gravity" along the way. Along with a bunch of other science fiction.

Pretty much the game-theory asshole's take on colonization via Von Neumman machines. The argument goes that, in an environment where diplomatic missives can only travel at the speed of light, and hypothetical relativistic kinetic-kill vehicles a few factors of ten slower, you have to do unto others before they do unto you...

Since the majority of near-surface gold is now attributed to asteroid strikes, and rocks near the surface are mostly other stuff, it seems reasonable to conclude that there must be asteroids that are extremely enriched in such ores. Actually, mining asteroids would seem unnecessary - you'd really want a very early solar system in which you still had mostly accretion disk. You're then dealing with ultra-pure dust in a gigantic centrifuge. Most of the ores of interest should concentrate in bands that can easi

Gold that is available in large amounts is something we could expect in certain space environments like you describe. Of course, it would be worth less than dirt once discovered (assuming economical extraction), but it would be pretty cool just for the resource value. Gold is pretty useful once you get past the relative scarcity. It's an excellent conductor and it doesn't like to corrode. If it were as common as copper, we'd be using it for our electrical distribution system instead. Of course, who knows wh

Gold is a wonderful conductor. Silver is slightly better, if I remember correctly from the handbook on the electrical and chemical properties of elements my father had, but it oxidizes rather too readily. (If you could solve the reactivity of it, it would absolutely trounce copper for the interconnects on ICs just as copper did when it replaced aluminium.) So, yeah, for long-distance wiring, running gold cables would be wonderful - at least, underground. Gold's a bit too soft for my liking for overhead cabl

Yes, I believe the building of intergalactic highway could cause our planet to be obliterated:)... and since none of us has checked or complained to our regional intergalactic highway office we have to get our act together very soon and leave the planet:)... though the dolphins & the whales are still here... so doom is not yet imminent haha... do you have your towel ready?

I had the same question. What I'm curious to know is how random their sample of sun-like stars is. If they cherry picked them, their results can't be used for estimating Drake parameters. (But who could blame them their first couple times out?)

Note 3 of the article:"the planets found by HARPS are around stars close to the Sun. This makes them better targets for many kinds of additional follow-up observations"

Note 8 is also relevant:"With large numbers of measurements, the detection sensitivity of HARPS i

The standard Drake equation isn't really very useful, and most Xenobiologists don't take it as a serious tool to describe their subject.

1. When people first started putting methane and ammonia in flasks and running lightning through them (the Miller–Urey experiment in 1952), some scientists actually applied that to the Drake equation soon after, and said that they could now put a number on the Drake term for how likely life was to begin. The experiment implied a very high number, effectively demonstra

"HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla.The instrument is built to obtain very high long term radial velocity accuracy (on the order of 1 m/s). To achieve this goal, HARPS is designed as an echelle spectrograph fed by a pair of fibres and optimised for mechanical stability. It is contained in a vacuum vessel to avoid spectral drift due to temperature and air pressure variations. One of the two fibres collects the star light, while the second is used to either record simultaneously a Th-Ar reference spectrum or the background sky. The two HARPS fibres (object + sky or Th-Ar) have an aperture on the sky of 1"; this produces a resolving power of 115,000 in the spectrograph. Both fibres are equipped with an image scrambler to provide a uniform spectrograph pupil illumination, independent of pointing decentering."

1.) It's an optical telescope.2.) It's on the face of the earth (I find this amazing.)

I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.

I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.

Well there's two things:1) Some things just aren't observable from earth, certain parts of the spectrum don't reach us.2) Atmospheric distortion, like you see the air shimmer in the desert on a very warm day.

The first one is still real. The second one we now have huge computers that compensate for it, it's by no means easy yet still easier than blasting massive yet incredibly precise and fragile telescopes into space. And we still place our observatories high in the mountains to avoid as much as possible. O

There is one think I really wish I'd see in the summary: what stage of "discovery" are we at. Is this the first pass of the raw data? Or is this confirmation of unconfirmed data. We've seen some pretty high-profile new planets evaporate into thin air^h^h^h^h ether.

At the same time, I am still excited about this explosion of new discovery. If, somehow, we can continue to not self-destruct for another 50 years or so, we will see a cataloging of our galaxy that was only imagined in science fiction

We're just doomed to peering at them through telescopes, either on the ground or in LEO and guessing what it must be like to actually land on them. It's not like anyone's going to be able to reach them anytime soon, or is even working towards interplanetary (let alone interstellar) travel, with NASA going on facing budget cuts.

proving a universal negative is impossible. even worse, the tiny fraction of the universe we can *ever* hope to observe is something like one part in 10^26 of the estimated total. most of the universe could even be radically different than our "observable" one.

Ours and everyone else's. Seem to recall one theory (not sure who's or the exact wording) that basically states it is likely that by (or before) the time any race becomes advanced enough for interstellar flight it wipes itself out. We're well on our way.

Actually, there have been some breakthroughs in the last several years regarding measuring the movement of stars which appears to be how they found these planets.

Keep in mind that they found 50 planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars. 16 of these are considered "super Earths" in that they may be rocky planets like ours. Two of these planets may orbit in what we consider the "habitable" zone which means there may be liquid water which we figure is necessary for life. Of course, even if they're Earth-sized,